{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://hoyer.house.gov/media/press-releases/university-marylands-terp-magazine-steny-hoyer-yields-floor", "University of Maryland\u2019s Terp Magazine: Steny Hoyer Yields the Floor", "2026-09-09", "2026", "2026-09", "Democrat", "House", "MD", "Steny H. Hoyer", "H000874", "hoyer.house.gov", "hoyer", "https://hoyer.house.gov/media", "scraper", "WASHINGTON, DC \u2013 Congressman Steny H. Hoyer (MD-05) was featured in the University of Maryland's (UMD) Terp Magazine Fall 2026 edition. Click here to read the story or see below:\n\nSTENY HOYER YIELDS THE FLOOR\n\nBy John Tucker\n\nSeptember 4, 2026\n\nSipping a Beer at a Capitol Hill soir\u00e9e in 1988, John Berry \u201980 overheard a congressional staffer mention that a Virginia university was lobbying the National Archives to build a huge facility on its campus to house millions of its documents. The next morning Berry tipped off his boss, U.S. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer \u201963, that the prized repository was in play.\n\nWithin days, Hoyer and University System of Maryland Chancellor John S. Toll were leading the archivist of the United States on a tour of UMD\u2019s campus; a couple of weeks later, Hoyer added an earmark to an appropriations bill establishing UMD as the site of the eventual 1.8 million-square-foot building. A befuddled Virginia staffer who later ran into Berry said, \u201cI\u2019ve never been so thoroughly sideswiped. Hoyer outsmarted us.\u201d\n\nHoyer recalls the coup jubilantly: \u201cNow it\u2019s probably the premier archival institution in the world,\u201d he says. \u201cWe brought some fantastic researchers to the campus.\u201d\n\nIt was a classic move by Hoyer, who will retire from a 45-year career in Congress when his term ends in January. The longest-serving member of either chamber to represent Maryland, Hoyer shaped the influential 5th District abutting Washington into a research powerhouse, helping pump billions of dollars into behemoths like NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center, Patuxent River Naval Air Station and NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, many of them tightly aligned with the University of Maryland.\n\n\u201cSteny\u2019s leadership resulted in the modern federal research presence in the state of Maryland,\u201d says emeritus UMD trustee Tim Maloney, a former state delegate whose district overlapped with Hoyer\u2019s. \u201cHe did it quietly and without recognition. He was just interested in seeing results.\u201d\n\nThe No. 2 member of the Democratic caucus for two decades\u2014second only to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, an ally and frequent sparring partner\u2014Hoyer played the role of happy warrior and shrewd tactician, a consensus-building centrist who complemented her street-fighting progressivism. The 87-year-old has spent nearly his entire career in public office; Hoyer was elected in 1966 to the Maryland Senate and joined the U.S. House of Representatives in 1981.\n\n\"[Hoyer] is one of the most underrated giants of U.S. legislative history.\" John Berry '80 Former Staffer and Ambassador to Australia\n\nStill popular\u2014he won 72% of the vote in his district in the 2024 primary\u2014Hoyer walks away as the only Marylander to serve as majority leader. A throwback to an era when members of both major parties respected each other, he helped steer the passage of bipartisan landmark legislation including the 1990 American with Disabilities Act and the 2002 Help Americas Vote Act in response to the contested 2000 presidential election, the most sweeping election reform since the Voting Rights Act.\n\n\u201cHe is one of the most underrated giants of U.S. legislative history,\u201d says Berry, who after working for Hoyer ran President Obama\u2019s Office of Personnel Management and served as ambassador to Australia.\n\nFollowing retirement, Hoyer will donate his official papers to UMD Libraries, a collection that contains everything from personal notes, speeches, photos, campaign materials and correspondences with constituents and colleagues.\n\n\u201cFrom the very beginning, the University of Maryland has been a big part of my life, and I\u2019m very proud of it,\u201d he says.\n\nBorn in New York, Hoyer moved to District Heights, Md., as a child and enrolled in UMD in 1957 (tuition: $178). After posting 1.7 and 1.0 GPAs his freshman year, he took a semester off, then reenrolled, still without direction.\n\nOne day that spring, he was set to leave campus when a Pontiac convertible cruised by, carrying the guest speaker to the annual convocation ceremony. Hoyer thought the car looked cool and decided to follow it.\n\nThe teenager sat in awe as the handsome young U.S. senator talked passionately about politics and implored graduates to serve their communities and country. Immediately drawn to public service, Hoyer now calls his walk to the field house to hear John F. Kennedy \u201cmy road to Damascus.\u201d\n\nHe changed his major from business to government and politics and was elected student government vice president. After marrying his high school sweetheart and graduating with high honors, Hoyer enrolled in Georgetown law school and joined the campaign team of U.S. Rep. Daniel Brewster of Maryland; there, he met a young staffer from Baltimore named Nancy D\u2019Alesandro, who the following year became Nancy Pelosi. After he was elected president of the Maryland Young Democrats, anointed by The Washington Post as \u201ca man to watch\u201d and remained on staff when Brewster became a U.S. senator, he made his first run for elected office, distinguishing himself in a crowded field vying for a state Senate seat with a platform on fair housing.\n\nThe newly drawn district had backed segregationist candidate George Wallace in the 1964 presidential election, but Hoyer focused on a concentration of Black constituents, knocking on doors till his knuckles hurt. \u201cPeople saw a skinny white kid looking younger than my 26 years, and said, \u2018What are you doing here?\u2019\u201d he recalls. He won Black voters\u2019 support nearly 7-to-1 and claimed the seat by 300 votes. In Annapolis, he cast one of his first votes to end the ban on interracial marriage.\n\nAt 35, he became Maryland\u2019s youngest-ever Senate president, championing a district growing increasingly Black, educated, affluent and attractive to federal government workers. In 1981 he won a special election to represent the U.S. House\u2019s 5th District, earning the nickname Boy Wonder.\n\n\u201cThere was a certain way Steny Hoyer\u2019s heels click-clicked along the marble halls of the State House that set him apart from the others. He had the sharpest, most urgent click-click in Annapolis,\u201d the Post wrote upon his departure from the legislature.\n\nAmong his new constituents was Yvette Lewis, a Prince George\u2019s County music teacher who dreamed of singing professionally\u2014if only she could get her foot in the door at the Kennedy Center. Her husband suggested she call her congressman; maybe she could speak with a staffer. With surprising ease, she secured a meeting with Hoyer. She left with a smile and no expectations, but two weeks later received a letter from the Kennedy Center offering an interview.\n\nLewis landed a Kennedy Center teaching job, then a Washington Opera audition, then a resident understudy position. Following the contentious 2000 presidential election, she became politically active and ultimately served as chair of the Maryland Democratic Party for eight years. \u201cSteny Hoyer changed my life,\u201d she says.\n\nHoyer didn\u2019t remember their original meeting when they first bumped into each other in political circles years later, but that didn\u2019t surprise her.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not unique,\u201d says Lewis, now a close friend who sits on the University System of Maryland Board of Regents. \u201cI\u2019m one of a million Hoyer stories.\u201d\n\nHoyer gradually built his influence in Congress, chairing the Helsinki Commission on U.S.-European security, earning a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee and traveling to Darfur and South Sudan to raise awareness of genocide. He became Pelosi\u2019s chief lieutenant in 2003 and House majority leader in 2007, charged with scheduling floor business and mobilizing the party vote on important legislation.\n\nWith increased clout, he directed millions of dollars into UMD programs through federal agency appropriations. A savvy analyst, he identified potential research partnerships, joint faculty appointments and student pipelines connecting UMD to the government, then brokered behind-the-scenes deals.\n\n\u201cHe might tell his colleagues in the House, \u2018Hey, the engineering school\u2019s developing a remote sensing program that would be great for NASA Goddard,\u2019\u201d says Brian Darmody, chief strategy officer for the Association of University Research Parks. Formerly UMD\u2019s assistant vice president for research and economic development, he worked closely with Hoyer in the 2000s to establish M Square, a public-private research hub that has since grown into UMD\u2019s Discovery District Maryland.\n\nHoyer also secured funds from the Department of Defense for a UMD center now known as the Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security; from the Department of Agriculture for the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, where more than two dozen UMD faculty work; and from the Food and Drug Administration for its Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, which has a research partnership with UMD in College Park. On campus, Hoyer also helped net construction money for the Physical Sciences Complex and The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.\n\nMeanwhile, he continued preaching in support of civil rights. In 2010, when a bill to end the \u201cDon\u2019t Ask, Don\u2019t Tell\u201d policy banning gay Americans from serving openly in the military died in committee, Hoyer sidestepped the blockade by orchestrating a second Senate vote at the eleventh hour of the session, a \u201cpolitical miracle,\u201d says Berry, his former staffer.\n\nHoyer was the first person whom Berry came out to as gay, after his parents. When Berry\u2019s partner died of AIDS, Hoyer pulled over on Route 50 and listened to him weep on the phone for 30 minutes.\n\n\u201cHe\u2019s not only the best boss I\u2019ve ever had, but a mentor, a second father, a true saint,\u201d says Berry.\n\nHoyer looks younger han his 87 years, and he knows it. \u201cGod\u2019s been good,\u201d he says, after practically bounding into his office on the top floor of the Longworth building in crisp shirtsleeves and a yellow tie. Mentally sharp, though unsure whether he could deliver at 89, he is retiring somewhat reluctantly. Pelosi, his longtime colleague, is also stepping down at age 86.\n\nOne corner of Hoyer\u2019s office is dedicated to the late Rep. John Lewis, one of his closest friends in Congress, with whom he marched 15 times across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., to make good trouble. In an opposite corner is the flag of Denmark (the self-described \u201cproud Dane\u201d in 2009 was honored as a Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog).\n\nAfter retirement, he\u2019ll remain active in Democratic politics and spend more time in his St. Mary\u2019s County home. A rabid UMD football and basketball fan, he intends to keep shouting at nearly every home game alongside his wife, Elaine Kamarck, a director at a public policy nonprofit whom he married in 2023. (Hoyer\u2019s first wife, the educator Judy Pickett Hoyer, died in 1997, leading Hoyer to create early-childhood programs across Maryland in her name.)\n\nHe\u2019ll leave the House having shaped the careers of hundreds of staffers, including Jazz Lewis \u201911, MPP \u201914, who met Hoyer as a graduate student intending to become a community organizer. Instead, he agreed to lead his reelection campaign the day after commencement.\n\n\u201cHis approach to public service was kindness, thoughtfulness and always following up. Every function was super long because he listened to everyone\u2014it didn\u2019t matter if they were a mechanic or someone\u2019s granny,\u201d says Lewis, who became Hoyer\u2019s senior policy adviser and is now UMD\u2019s director of state government relations.\n\nHoyer\u2019s seat will almost certainly be inherited by another recent campaign manager, 32-year-old state Del. Adrian Boafo, who in June won the Democratic primary.\n\nEver congenial, the lion of the House laments that American politics has devolved into pettiness and divisiveness over the last decade. Still, he\u2019s an optimist, easily quoting from Kennedy\u2019s 1961 inaugural address: \u201cThe torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans ... unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.\u201d\n\nTwelve presidential administrations later, in an emotional January speech on the House floor to announce his retirement, Hoyer passed his own torch, urging his colleagues to examine their conscience and renew their courage: \u201cWe must remember that we are not great or unique because we say we\u2019re great, but because we are just, generous and fair.\u201d\n\n\"I believe in democracy. I believe that over time, people mostly do the right thing.\" Steny Hoyer '63", 1, "2026-09-10T09:25:58Z", "2026-09-10T09:27:09Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://hoyer.house.gov/media/press-releases/university-marylands-terp-magazine-steny-hoyer-yields-floor"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.4998563565313816, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}